On a bed at the female ward of
the University of Maiduguri Teaching Hospital laid a 15-year-old girl in an
evidently bad state. Her face and head were bandaged, leaving slits through
which only a bruised eye and swollen lips were visible. On her body were
clearer signs of trauma, with burns running from her neck down to the lower
parts of her body.Around her bed wafted a foul
smell, which a nurse who came to attend to her attributed to a septic wound in
the girl’s skull.
A nurse who does not want to
be named because she is not authorised to speak to the Press told the icirnigeria.org, that
a group of people from the biggest Internally Displaced Persons, IDP, camp in
Maiduguri dumped Lami (the surnames of all victims in this report are withheld
to protect them.) at the hospital.
“We have many of them. They’d
been either raped in the camp or sold by those that should be protecting them
in the camps,” the nurse said.Approached by the reporter, Lami tried to speak,
but her voice was muffled into a whisper as pains coursed through her body.
She said her parents were
killed by Boko Haram insurgents in her village and she managed to reach
Maiduguri, capital of Borno State, in an open truck that dropped people off at
a camp for displaced persons.In the course of moving from one camp to the
other, she was separated from her younger brother.“I do not know where he is,”
she said through muffled sobs.How did she end up in the hospital burnt and
battered?
Lami said some government
officials came to the camp and took many young girls away and later sold them
as slaves. She ended up in the house of one Alhaji Aliyu, whose brother and
wife abused her. While Aliyu’s brother repeatedly raped her, his wife weighed
in with physical abuse.
“One day, some people came to
the camp and said that they were taking us to a better place. That was how I
got to Alhaji Aliyu’s house and it was there, every day, his brother forcefully
slept with me.
“After that, he would beat me
and one of Alhaji’s wifes too would always beat me. One day she attacked me
with a knife. That was how I got the wound in my skull,” she recounted.
Lami’s case, depressingly, is
not an isolated one. Hundreds of girls are now being trafficked from some of
the IDP camps in the North east set up to cater for people displaced by the
insurgency, especially unregistered ones.It was learnt that because many of the
camps cannot accommodate all the people displaced from their homes by Boko
Haram attacks, many IDPs end up in makeshift unofficial camps close to the
officially designated ones or in nearby villages.
The people in the makeshift
camps are not officially registered and technically are not under the care of
government.They are usually taken care of by villagers or even relatives in the
government-run camps. Somehow, state officials have the same access and control
over these unofficial camps.
A
fertile ground for child trafficking
Kingsley Ogar, staff of an
international donor agency, who does not want his organisation named, confirmed
that child trafficking is rife in the IDP camps.
“We had a case in Gombe where
a group of persons came from the South, Lagos or Ibadan, we can’t be so sure,
paid some people and took away children from the camp.
“We went to deliver relief
items in this particular IDP Camp and took a census so that we could come back
the following day, which we did, only to realize that over a dozen of them were
missing. They were mostly young children between the ages of 5 and 15. “Upon
investigation we discovered that some “lords” in the camp were in partnership
with the Lagos people to sell the kids.
“We reported to the police
(Gombe State command), but we do not know whether they have done anything”, he
said.
Our reporter learnt of an IDP
camp in Yola where there were said to be about 900 children without parents. It
was alleged that children were being sold and trafficked in the camp.
Our reporter visited the camp
posing as an official of a church that takes care of children and made startling
discoveries. An official in the camp named Raila, who wore the reflective vest
of the National Emergency Management Agency, NEMA, told the reporter to wait while
she went into a makeshift office. There, she spoke with a male colleague, whom
she said is an official of NEMA.
She returned to announce: “You
will pay N50,000.for each child and you can only go with three if you want them
today,” as if she was in a livestock market. Apparently not totally devoid of
conscience, she tried to rationalise her illicit trade. “We use the money to
take care of the other children still here,” she said. Without any attempt at
verifying the reporter’s identity and in less than 30 minutes, three children
were ready to be sold, possibly never to return to their roots.
Further investigations
revealed that such child trafficking business is a thriving and well-run racket
in most IDP camps in the insurgency ravaged North east. It is a triangular
manifestation of evil that comprises some heartless displaced persons,
unscrupulous camp officials and child traffickers.
Displaced persons who know the
children without parents act as middlemen between the buyer and the seller.
They liaise with people who come from places as far flung as Akwa Ibom, Lagos,
Abuja, Katsina, to carry out the first step in the trafficking process.
The displaced person also
identifies the children to be sold and goes ahead to negotiate a price, which,
it was gathered, could range from as little as N10,000 to as much as N100,000.
After negotiations, the middleman approaches the camp official in charge. The
official collects the money and approves the release of the kids.The child
trafficker, we gathered, then re-sells the children to an interested
family as a domestic servant or slave.
Like Lami, many, if not all of
these children, have very little education. They have little knowledge of their
rights and no clue as to how to return home. Those they entrusted their lives
with at the IDP camps liaise with the traffickers and agents exploiting their
vulnerability in this hideous transaction.
More heart-rending tales
In Gombe, 16-year-old Laraba
told the icirnigeria.org that
an official of the state emergency relief agency named Ibrahim took her from
the camp where she was to his home on the pretext that she would be helping the
wife with household chores.
“I was happy leaving the camp,
but when we got to his house, there was no wife. He raped me continuously for
three nights, locked me inside his house for days and threatened me.”
She continued, “I managed to
escape and came back to the camp. I got pregnant. An old woman we call ‘Kaka’,
gave me some leaves. I was bleeding for almost two weeks and smelling.”
She said she is currently
feeling better and has overcome the ordeal. But she had to suffer in silence as
she could not tell anyone because she thought nobody would believe her and for
fear of being sent away from the camp.
“I am not the only one this
has happened to and I am sure Ibrahim, the health worker, is not the only one
doing this type of thing,” she reasoned.
Thirty-two year old Binta
caught our reporter’s attention
as she muttered to herself, looking like a traumatized person. The tale she
told was shocking and distressing. Sadly, no one believes her or is willing to
do anything about it.
“After the attack in Mubi, I
fled with my one year old child.
“From the first camp we were,
a secondary school, I was told a family in Yola was coming to take us. They
came to pick me and my baby. When I saw them I was suspicious, but what could I
do, with anyone to help? I put my baby in the car, and they sped away,” she
said resignedly.
Binta is realistic to know
that she might never see her baby again but her problem is what to tell her
husband from whom she was separated in the aftermath of the attack on Mubi.
“I have lost all hope of ever
seeing my baby again. I do not know whether my husband is alive or not. A
family member says he was among those who ran to Cameroon.
“If he finds me tomorrow, what
do I tell him about our baby?” she wondered.
Sixteen year-old Aisha is in
an IDP camp in Gombe and is three months pregnant.
She had been sexually abused
by men from a community near the IDP camp and denied contact with anyone.“I want to go back home, but
there is no home. My village is near Gwoza. They started sleeping with me since
I came to the camp. I was told if that I refused, they would kill me,” she
claimed.Hiding her face behind a veil,
she said: “I feel like killing myself. I guess that’s the only way out of this
misery.”
Official
complicity and complacency
Many aid workers in the IDP
camps allege that there is a conspiracy of silence, which encourages government
officials in many of the IDP camps to continue to exploit the displaced persons.One aid worker pointedly
accused officials of the National Emergency Management Agency, NEMA, the police
and state government officials of being behind the child trafficking racket in
the IDP camps.Since the same officials that
these cases should be reported to are the perpetrators, many victims just keep
quiet for fear of being sent out of the camp.
Osim Jones, a Jos-based
lawyer, who has helped rescue many trafficked girls, said that the allegation
of child trafficking in the displaced persons’ camp and the complicity of
policemen and other government officials is real and that federal government
should investigate the accusations.
Jones said it was sad that the
authorities do not believe that these evils are happening in the IDP camps and
that they constitute a major problem.
“We can’t give up or be silent
because the police are denying, aid workers don’t want to talk,” he stated.The agency that should really
be in charge of displaced persons camps is the National Commission of Refugees,
but the agency has absolutely no presence in any of the IDP camps visited in
Borno and Gombe states.
That is not surprising, as the
Federal Government has not shown any seriousness in funding the agency. Not
much is appropriated for the agency, and of its budget, funds allocated to
purchases directly related to refugees matters have dwindled even though the
insurgency in the North east has increased in the last two years.
In 2012, of the miserly N512
million appropriated for the commission, only N70 million meant for purchase of
health and medical equipment had anything to do with refugee matters.
In 2014, of the N616 million
budgeted for the agency, only N19.4 million appropriated for medical supplies
had any bearing to refugees. Even at that, there was no indication where the
medical supplies would go.
This website learnt that with
increasing complaints to the government about the conditions in the IDP camps,
the office of the Attorney-General, last year, sent an official of the National
Commission for Refugees to one of the camps in Maiduguri to study the situation
and see how the agency can get more involved.
However, no other agency in
the camp was ready to relate to the lady sent by the Attorney-General’s office.
Worse still, it was learnt that her visit and stay in the camp were also not
adequately funded, a development that forced her to return to Abuja after two
weeks.
In Yola, the Adamawa State
capital, the state’s police spokesperson, was unavailable to comment. But an
officer, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said: “We cannot
exclude the fact that criminals are taking advantage of the current situation,
but there are no official complaints.”
The National Agency for the
Prohibition of Traffic in Persons and Other Related Matters, NAPTIP, the agency
which by law should prevent human trafficking, appears to be unaware of the
illegal trade in children going on in the camps. Efforts to speak to the
executive secretary of the agency, Beatrice Jedy-Agba, were futile but the head Press and Publications Research
Unit, of the agency, Josiah Emerole, that NAPTIP was not aware of any
trafficking of humans in the IDP camps. He said also that the agency had not
received any reports of such atrocities occurring in the IDP camps.
Emerole, who appeared shocked
when confronted with details of our investigation, promised to reach out to the
NAPTIP zonal offices in the North east to verify and act speedily on the
allegations.
Confronted with the results of
our findings, officials of NEMA also claimed ignorance of the atrocities being
committed by the agency’s officials and others in the IDP camps.
The agency’s chief information
officer, Sani Datti, said that the NEMA headquarters was not aware of the
allegations and had not received any reports of cases of child trafficking in
the IDP camps in the North east.
“These allegations you have
made are grave and serious but we cannot really address them here at the
headquarters. We have to reach the zonal coordinators to get the real fact or
investigate them,’ he said.
Datti gave our reporter the
contacts of the NEMA coordinators in the North east but they all feigned
ignorance of the criminal activities of officials in the camps.
Nema’s coordinator in Gombe,
Sa’ad Ahmad Minin, said he was not aware of any cases of rape or child
trafficking in any camp under his jurisdiction. When given specific details of
Laraba who was raped by Ibrahim, Minin referred this website to an official
named Hajara, whom he said was on ground and in direct charge of the camps.
On the phone, Hajara too
denied knowledge of any incident of rape or child trafficking but promised to
investigate the matter.
‘I do not know of any such
case. But as you have told me now, tomorrow I will go to the camp and
investigate,” she said.
However, an official of NEMA
who spoke to our reporter but does not want to be named confided that many of
the officials of the agencies in the camps are not regular staff but
volunteers.“Our officies in those places
are short staffed and many of the people you see wearing NEMA reflective vests
are actually not our staff but volunteers. But as you say they are there acting
for the agency so we must be held responsible for their actions,” the official
stated.
When the icirnigeria.org confronted the National Human
Rights Commission, NHRC, with the result of its investigations, its chairman,
Chidi Odinkalu, said that he had received reports of abuses in the IDP camps,
including rape and child trafficking.
Odinkalu said the commission
has set machinery in motion to engage government agencies involved in managing
the IDP camps as well as security agencies on the need to investigate the
allegations and stop such abuses. He, however, lamented that such efforts have
not been very successful.
He added that the NHRC would
explore all avenues to investigate the allegations and take appropriate action.
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